12-01-2016

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A Crush On Matisse’s SnailPainter and Curator, New York

For the New York-based painter slash curator Kimia Ferdowsi Kline, her Iranian roots and affiliation with Persian culture persist outside the detached borders of Iran. Albeit being barred from her father’s ghost homeland, Kimia inserts herself in the imaged part of her heritage through her gravitation to the arts at a young age. In her twenties, upon earning an MFA in visual arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011, Kimia, whole-heartedly spending eight months in southern India, was bestowed with an artist residency at The Dune. Also an in-house curator of the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Kimia’s achievements come in quick succession. Honoured to be one of the Makehouse Residency’s 2014–15 sponsored artists in May 2014, the gifted artist was most recently chosen as the Basil Alkazzi Artist in Residence at Wayne State University in Detroit in conjunction with NYFA.

In this Style Talk, Kimia discusses her paint-filled dress style, finding yummy honey for tea in the mornings, and how you can always find adorable hair clips in her purse.

What does your ideal working outfit look like?
An old T-shirt and jeans I don’t mind getting paint on.

What’s your favourite art-related blog or app?Art Observed does a good job of covering all the art-world bases.

What was the last thing you bought and loved?
This Ulla Johnson dress.What is/are your personal style signifier(s)/identifier(s)?
My clothes usually have paint somewhere on them.

What’s your necessary extravagance?
Really good honey for my tea in the mornings.

Three things/products you always need to have in your purse?
Hair clip, Dior lipstick, sunglasses.

What’s you ultimate beauty secret after long working hours?
A good night’s sleep.

What’s/are your favourite work(s) of art?
Matisse’s Snail is an all-time favourite. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa is the reason I became a painter. And I return time and time again to the portraits and landscapes of David Hockney and Fairfield Porter.

What in the art world currently excites you the most?
The artwork of Misaki Kawai, Danny Fox, Andrew Tarlow, Shara Hughes, Tal R, and Picasso’s sculpture exhibit at MoMA right now.

Most sexy art person?
Hikari Yokoyama.

Where are you off to next?
I’m headed to Detroit for a five-week residency that I won through the New York Foundation for the Arts. I’ll be teaching painting at a university there, as well as preparing for a solo show at the university’s gallery come April 2016.

Where is your next art trip/travel headed?
Detroit.

In your eyes: What is the most arty city?
New York, no question.

Someone you have in mind to call the perfect art-world gentleman?
I’ve never met him, but I imagine the artist Tal R to be a true gent.

Which artist should we have on our watchlist?
Danny Fox. His paintings are excellent.